It’s a Lake, Not the Sea!

Have you ever noticed how much stuff comes out in the spring for people decorating around a beach theme? Stores stock up on octopus dish towels, sand dollar beach towels, pictures of dolphins jumping, and plaques telling me how my toes feel in sand.

We’ve decorated this little cottage casually. It’s a lake cottage. Most of the furnishings we already had and are just putting a “lake” spin on things. And that’s my problem. There are very few lake decorations. I’ve found items for the mountains, the west, and the sea, but not much for the lake. I don’t want the whole thing to be a lake motif, just a few touches, and we don’t have many octopuses in this lake.

Most mornings, the lake looks like this:

The above pic was one morning about 7am. A flock of ducks landed while I stood on the deck and snapped this with my cell.

One afternoon, this guy came cruising by:

Everything is nice and calm.

This past winter, there was a lot of rain and flooding. The power company let our lake level rise to prevent more flooding downstream. It looked like this for a week or more. The rock fire pit is to the left of my monkey by that lone chair back sticking up out of the water. The strips of wood that appear to be floating are hand railings to the dock in the background. The water came to within 10 feet of our lower porch.

In the following picture, the lake is down.

See those two posts on the right side of the floating dock? The dock floats up & down on those posts. In the above picture, the water rose so much, the dock almost topped the posts and came off it’s mooring.

The lake’s down now. But, yesterday, we had high winds all day and the lake became the sea—

We do have clams. See that little beach area at the bottom of the picture? There are some substantial rocks there, but drift wood and fresh water shells wash up, along with the occasional shoe or hat. I find myself checking the lake each morning to see what’s floating by. No dead bodies, yet.

I collected several sets of shells. Fresh water clams.

I happened to be in Home Goods, one of my favorite stores. You can come across some very good deals. They had a 6′ sofa for $200. That was unusual, to be sure, but still . . . $200!

I picked up two shadow box frames. Similar, but different. Same sizes. I already had some burlap, which I cut to fit inside each frame as a background matting. Carefully glued the shells on with E6000. That could have been a little overkill. E6000 is super strong. Elmer’s would probably have worked or even a hot glue gun, but I keep E6000 handy. And I hate an unnecessary re-do.

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